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In India

Amid Plenty

Anuradha Mittal On The True Cause Of World Hunger

The United Nations estimates that around 830 million people in the world do not have adequate access to food. Numbers, though, distance us from the real pain felt by the hungry. Hunger is a form of torture that takes away your ability to think, to perform normal physical actions, to be a rational human being. There are people in my own country, India, who for months have not had a full stomach, who have never had adequate nutrition. This sort of hunger causes some to resort to eating anything to numb the pain: cats, monkeys, even poisonous roots.

Jingling Bracelets

Saïd awakens at three in the morning and has a cup of strong coffee and some leftover couscous from the night before. His children are still sleeping in the mud house, but his wife has been up for a while to get the fire going and make the coffee. The two of them sit quietly beside the fire. She yawns, waiting for him to leave so she can go back to sleep. He has a long walk ahead of him, at least six hours.

Alice Laughs Last

Alice doesn’t smile when she opens the door. She doesn’t have a lot to smile about, and, more than that, to smile would be to grant me points I have not yet earned. At this juncture, I am still a tentacle of authority, reaching out to invade the nominal sanctity of her home.

Down And Out

Going outside to blow bubbles; finding a note stuck to a barn wall with a knife; realizing grandfather wasn’t senile

My Life As A Mermaid

I get another letter from my sister Kay, who is in Honduras riding mules and skidding around the muddy mountain roads in a pickup truck. The roads have curves sharp enough to tempt death, she writes, sharp enough for you to see yourself leaving.

Sunbeams

If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.

Elizabeth Janeway

Urban Renewal

The Resurrection Of An Ex-Gang Member — An Interview With Luis Rodríguez

Someone once pointed out to me that the word respect comes from the latin respectus, which means “to see again.” It’s a beautiful concept. We have to see each other again. We have to see the gang member again, and the poor farmer, too. As we see them again, we find they’re not that different from us, that a thread connects us all: the Indian on the reservation and the immigrant just arriving on these shores; the middle-class kid in the suburbs and the gang member in the inner city. The more we look, the thicker that thread becomes. Sometimes it may be invisible, but it’s there. We’ve got to make it more visible. There is no such thing as a separate reality. What we do here affects people over there.

Crimes And Misdemeanors

A partner in crime, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a double-dog dare

Foot Soldier

The Long Walk For Justice And Peace — A Conversation With Satish Kumar

The central realization that pulled me away from monkhood was that there is no escaping from life; the spirit has to be practiced in the everyday world, and not outside of it. The world is beautiful — the earth, the land, the people — and you have to accept even pain and suffering as part of that beauty. That realization threw me into the social, political, economic, cultural arena. It convinced me that wholeness of life is paramount.